Lauren Barghout

Bio

A scientist, inventor and serial entrepreneur, Dr. Lauren Barghout holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Vision Science from the University of California at Berkeley and a Bachelors degree in Physics from Hampshire College. She is an expert in the use of fuzzy set theory in representing Visual Gestalts and inventor of the Gestalt-based image segmentation and labeling technique that underpins the natural vision processing system used commercially in image/video back-ground removal systems, object recognition and image labeling system. Her research has contributed to the understanding of context-dependent spatial vision, spatial masking, theoretical and computational psychophysics, and the application of fuzzy set theory to human and machine vision systems using natural-scene-perception taxonomy comprised of spatial-taxons to automatically segment an image into contextually relevant regions. Lauren founded and led several companies including Paravue Corporation in 2004, Eyegorithm in 2010, and the research group BurningEyeDeas (and perception experiments at the annual Burning Man Art Festival) in 20017. Currently she is a visiting scholar at the Berkeley Initiative for Soft Computing, computer science and electrical engineering at U.C. Berkeley and writing: "Essential Computer Vision: Fuzzy and Bayesian techniques" with co-author Anthony DiFranco